


The Gentle Days

by orphan_account



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Not Canon Compliant, Romance, Slow Build, Slow Burn, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-14 20:03:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8027134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A series of sometimes related and unrelated drabbles and vignettes, about the life of Aaron Hotchner, current Unit chief of the BAU unit-4, and former Technical/Targeting Analyst at the CIA, and the people around him.Don't forget to leave a comment, I could really use the feedback. :)





	1. Chapter 1

HALEY:

 

Every case starts out with a call—whether it’s JJ’s phone going off or anyone elses', a liaison from the NCAVC field offices calling to tell them, they have a piled up consultation list or a serial killer surfacing, or of the threat surfacing them, the BAU Unit 4’s job always start with phones ringing somewhere.

 

When the phone starts to ring again at the dead of the night, Haley wakes up before Aaron. She looks down at the tired, prematurely lined face, and wonders why on earth did he decide to join the FBI, after he seemed quite happy with his job before. She feels a deep sense of betrayal as she gently shakes him awake. It is strange that he hasn’t woken up, being the light sleeper that he is.

 

Aaron looks groggy and dazed—he never does that, other than cases where he quietly slips sleeping pills in his scotch—and Haley quietly hands him the phone. He shoots her an apologetic look before padding away quietly into the hall. If she strains her ears, she can make out the mumble, the ebb and fall of his dark voice filtering into the room. It is oddly soothing to her ears.

 

She is asleep long before her husband finishes the call, dresses swiftly in the cold room, plants a small kiss on her cheek and leaves, the swish of shutting bedroom door swirls around her.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

EMILY:

 

Emily Prentiss is very tired. She climbs out of the pool, and is giddy for maybe three seconds.

 

_Ah, karma. Mother always said hard work is the essence of good things._

 

She has not been practising, and it’s showing. 20 laps had left her slightly giddy, and her bones ache. She fondly remembers her days at Yale, and her easy strokes through the pool there, the laps that seemed little more than a glide.

 

_Age. Age comes to all of us. Whether we like it or not._

 

And so does nostalgia, she supposes.

 

As she takes the lift back to her penthouse apartment, she rests lightly against the chrome plated walls, and lets her mind drift to the day that lies in front of her. It is a Sunday, and there is a barbecue party at Rossi’s(Knowing the old fox, there will be probably be good wine—as she jerks back from the thought, just a little bit), and it’s going to be a special day for JJ, who wants to introduce them to her boyfriend, a police officer.

 

As she enters her showers, she vaguely wonders whether she should just politely call in sick. It almost doesn’t seem right, that they have to gather together, and celebrate—a nice cover-up that they have almost non-existent social lives. She quite likes her colleagues and she knows Reid loves these tiny little kitty parties, but inevitably, inexorably, as the day dies, their conversations turn to the death and decay that they breathe in and out, see and dream, relive and feel.

 

She doesn’t know how Rossi does it, the ways his eyes crinkling with absent-minded fascination as he narrates the details from a complex, often gory case. Neither does she understand how Haley does it, or maybe for her, it is just a passing shadow in a mid-afternoon. Still, Emily doesn’t believe that showering before leaving the office washes the scent away. She must know, must have known the tinge of fire and blood and death-knells that shiver around all of them, Hotch the most. 

 

Towelling her hair dry, picking out a casual shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans, Emily wonders and sighs.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

JJ:

 

William’s eyes are sadder and kinder than anybody she has ever seen.

 

They look ancient in his youthful face. His eyelids are tinged with lavender, and his cheeks are brushed with stubble. She watches him, the early morning rays lighting up the dust over them, dancing like swirling stars.

 

His eyes shine like the moons, right under the twirl of the sun.

 

JJ touches his nose, her fingers skating across his face, fingertips tingling. There is a light dusting of hair, just a shadow. His skin is pale, but nothing can rival his moonstone eyes. It is strange.

 

She remembers when she first saw him, and how those pale, kind eyes and the soft, southern voice with lilt made the hidden butterflies wake up and flit around for a while, how everytime they touch, those blue butterflies shiver from her skin to his. It is almost beautiful, and she feels her blood turn fuschia and she is slightly giddy.

 

She kisses him, and he tastes very slightly like the inanity of love and her fingers glide and tap over his piano spine.

 

She wants to play him now, under her fingers, drawing him out, and sweeping him in, burst into symphonies and ragtime tunes.

 

It is so perfect, and she is so scared of it shattering, and yet, and yet, she wraps her heart bravely him, like always and goes.

 

He feels like life as he moves under her.

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Hotch:

 

He is often nostalgic. He is getting old, he knows, and at 35, he feels 60, and as the general thumb rule, memories crowd forth.

 

It is often of Haley.

 

He remembers the first time he saw her, hands and mouth moving with childish enthusiasm at the rehearsal, and he remembers the feeling he had—cold and warm and the hum of crickets on his neurons. He remembers the heat of the persimmon blooming on his cheeks.

 

He remembers so many things. Away from her, he can feel her phantom fingers wrapping around his own, and as he sinks into sleep, he can feel the strawberry shampoo he hates. It makes him restful, and sleepy, and calm. With her ghost hovering so close, he feels free to dive into the psyches that are chaos, smelling like blood and rust.

 

He remembers fear too. He doesn’t really remember, it is simple and it is there, like the extra hydrocarbons in air. He fears the look in Haley’s eyes when he has to leave when they are about to kiss, fears all the tears he never sees but knows she sheds in her pillow, in cold, empty nights. Fears the thrill of puzzles rearranging in his mind. Fears the gravity of the cases when they trap him in his office as he pores over the reports, time slipping away. Fears how he forgets her existence during those cold, empty night.

 

Sometimes, he wonders who is it that he had really married, Haley or fear.


	5. Chapter 5

Spencer Reid

 

Whenever there is leisure, his fingers itch to take printouts.

 

There is so much research done, relations and co-relations, thousands of parameters found and discarded, neural networks mapped. He reads, and he reads. He wants to _know_ , simply know, for the sake of knowing.(Isn’t that always the point, anyway?)

 

He always scrambles through papers and journals and obscure old proofs and theorems—mathematical dioramas, at times, just to satisfy the gnaw of the need to _know_ , to understand, to grasp.

 

But this is different.

 

Visceral, and powerful, the nightmare wolves sometimes wake him up, howling for his blood, and his oh-so-fragile sanity. He notes them, all of them. Meticulously. He must know. Bad or good, he simply must.

 

He mulls over and over it again, his thoughts skating and skittering to all sorts awkward, spherical angles—and the skin over his brachial vein, itches, oh god it itches, to punctured, the thin needle filling with his tangled arteries and inarticulate nerves with jangling music. He wants to lie in the violet dark, body electric.

 

_One drop, and you can visualise the strings that pull the universe around._

 

He denies and he denied and he denies.

 

Good or bad, he only just wants to run smack into the elephant in the room.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Emily Prentiss

 

She wonders why they had never told anyone that she and Hotch had met each other before, once, much before.

She had been untainted by blood, and dying to get a taste for it. She was the cotton-candy wrapped girl in the world of power and politics, and of silver-grey roses in silver-grey vases, and world-doting parents, and all she wanted to do was lie in raggedly tatters across the street, soaked in cheap alcohol, disappointing that world.

He was a dark stranger she saw in the computer science symposium, in Yale, where her then boyfriend had dragged her into. Their eyes, almost identical, locked over fifty seats.

She was hungover and high, and beautiful in the aftermath, the night. Sitting by the side of a pavement, hidden by a couple of yews. He had come out of the warm road lights, and it framed his angles and awkwardness in dark lines and fuzzy tangerine.

At first, she was going to tell him to fuck off. But that night, there was an elegiac hum in the night, or maybe it was the drug in her head, she had felt benevolent. She wanted to bestow him.

“Hey,” She greeted him. “Come, sit.”

He had. She was greeted by the cheekbones and a jawline that would make her bleed if she dared to brush her fingers ( _no, not fingers, maybe her face, so that they can cut each other,_ _ **slice**_ _each other open to the bones_ ). He was dark, and his pale skin had flamed in the yellow dead light.

“Where are you from?” She felt careless, reckless and feckless—he was just a boy—one of the many she spat out every day—what harm can a boy do to the queen of Amsterdam?

“Cambridge, now,” He says, and his dark voice beats with black wings against her dusty, smoky heart ( _it’sthedrugsit’sthedrugsit’sthedrugs)_ “But Louisville, originally.”

“The good old southern boy”, she whispers, and she can see him swallowing, and the pleasure is good. “Why are you here? Coast to coast?”

“The symposium. Are you from here?”

“I do study in Yale,” She murmurs, and gazes at him, and smiles at the sunset heat on his young, pale face. “MIT?”

He nods, and the apple in his throat bobs, and she feels like a kiss.

 

******

Almost a decade later, she returns to Yale, to complete the road. She rejected it, once furious at her dorm-mates, and went to walk the world. Now, sober as breakfast, she humbly returns.

In the summer before graduation, she returns home, after more than a year.

“Ah, dear,” Her mother tells her, as they sit for dinner. “I do wish you had met my new head of securities. He just completed his tenure last week. What a nice young man.”

“Oh really,” The soup is exactly the way she likes it, creamy and thick. “What is his name?”

“Aaron Hotchner.”

The tiny tap on her heart make her slightly breathless.

“Ah,” She agrees with her mother. “It would have been nice to meet him.”

 

****

She does.

The stern eyes look well suited his face, as angular as she remembers. He doesn’t look as young any more, in fact, it is quite old, older than her own. He doesn’t seem to remember her, but the little flash of recognition in his eyes betray him.

Lonely boy looks like angry man, and she giggles a little bit every time she calls him “Sir.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I remember in Fisher King Part 1, Hotch says that he was in the end of his junior year in 1987, which makes his age around 16-17 (Let's assume 16), which puts his birth year around 1971. For Emily, we have more clear ideas--her headstone shows 1970 as her birth year. So, it is quite possible that they went to college around the same time.   
> But also I remember the first time that Hotch and Emily meet, it comes out that when Hotch was the head of her mother's security, she had been away to Yale. So, in the middle she could have either quit her degree and gone back to complete it, or had gone back for an advanced degree. 
> 
> Sorry for the long note, and the long chapter.


	7. Chapter 7

David Rossi 

Rossi watches them over, and presides on the table. There is Derek, and Reid laughing with Garcia on some inside joke she had hatched over seven glasses of champagne. It is a strange day, as even Reid’s eyes have the amber glitter which only champagne can bring. 

There is the shy and blushing JJ and the shy and discomposed William, the centre of everyone’s attention, only when they remember to give it. They are sweet and haloed in love, and it is happy around them. 

Then there is Hotch and Haley, and he knew it would have happened, Prentiss. 

Prentiss is looking at Hotch and Haley talk and laugh, with a curious intensity, her eyes glassy and hazed. Over and over he sees the mask of marriage slip into little angry jabs, quick sharp looks, old buried tears. Over and over he sees avarice in Prentiss’s eyes, and really, why should she not?

But nothing is ever said between them. It can’t be, Rossi knows, because Hotch and Prentiss are both fools for honour and ethics, and Hotch is too much like Gideon to ever admit to anyone that anything is wrong. It’s almost a subliminal message that seemed to have passed down from Max Ryan to Jason Gideon to Aaron Hotchner, or maybe it’s a genetic trait inherent to the three of them, but there’s just something that fosters some sort of arrogance about it. An arrogance that stops Hotch that conveying the simple message to Haley that even he is not invulnerable. 

Rossi cannot blame any of them, other than maybe Hotch. 

Only thing he does is sit back and watch as the couple fast approaches collapse, and Prentiss rest her chin on Hotch’s shoulder as they dance. He is almost glad when Hotch does not pull away instantaneously.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 7

The case came in around the end of August. It is warm and sunny, and there are people everywhere as Emily makes her way to the conference. It is air-conditioned and the cold air hits her like stone as she enters.

There is a milieu of people--her colleagues are obviously there, and along with them, three police investigators, medical examiners and a couple of analysts sitting all around a plethora of papers, photographs and reports. The unit chief, conspicuously, is missing.

Emily knows what it was about. She had received a brief email from Hotch at the night before, along with some low-res pictures. Casterly Rock, a tiny town of seven thousand people in Western North Carolina had seen two murders, one male child and one female teenager, two months apart. A month later of the previous murders, the police had found the body of yet another male teenager. They had been both sexually assaulted, and subjected to electrical torture, before being shot clean at the back of the head. The police had looked for applied to the BAU for help, with no leads and nothing to go by.

The BAU, as they had gone through the initial dissection of the case, and gone through ViCAP, had found a interesting match, a man named Dinah Wilson, originally from Las Vegas, who had killed two men, one adult and one adolescent, almost exactly, but he had stabbed them. He was on the run.  
As she takes her seat beside Morgan, eyes turn towards her. She recognizes Rosaline Mae, the chief medical officer of Virginia and also a consulting forensic pathologist of the Bureau’s Investigative Support Unit, and Liz Osborne, the ViCAP analyst. The police investigators, she is unfamiliar with.

One of them, a large beefy man with a florid face and dark circles, extends his hand to her. She takes it. His hands are as cold and clammy as his eyes.

“James Ribley”, He introduces himself to her. “State Bureau of Investigation.”

“Emily Prentiss,” She tells him, without any warmth.

The other investigators duly introduces themselves, Henry Walsh and Denish Whittaker. She nods to them.

Ribley starts the presentation. At first all of them helped themselves to the photos--Emily sees they were the same ones Hotch had emailed them before. Judging by the lack of expression on the other’s faces, she assumes she had not been the only one. She wonders for a short second about why he had not sent a group email.

Ribley goes through the photos one by one, and the groups looks at ones in their own hands. Emily wonders where Hotch is.

Just as she is about to text Morgan, the conference room door opens.

“Sorry for being late.” Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner shuts the conference room door behinds his back as he briefly met her eyes. Tall and trim, with sharp features and black hair, he is dressed in a dark suit and was loaded down with paperwork and his laptop and smartphone. No one speaks as he briskly took his chair at the head of the table and jotted several notes with a Mont Blanc pen. After a moment, Ribley starts again.

Emily riffles through the photos, as Ribley talked, giving them the basics of the case. There was no blood around the bodies, and even though medical evidence suggested that they had been dead for almost 4 to 5 days, that seemed surprisingly well preserved.

They go over and over of such details, and by the next three hours, there is bright pinpoint of pain in the center of her forehead.

“But the MO?”, Morgan asks in between, for maybe the fifth time.

“I am not excluding the possibility that this is not Dinah,” Hotch responds, “But you also have to consider that a gun is much more efficient than a stab. But rather than that, if it is Dinah, we need to think why he is committing organized murder rather than disorganized, rage-fueled crimes--”

And it goes on.  
*****  
It ends after almost four hours. Emily is unusually tired.

As she is preparing to leave the conference room, Reid comes up to her, his eyes watchful and concerned.

“Emily, you look tired,” He says, while staring at her face.

She gives him the truth, because he deserves to know. “I am having difficulty sleeping a bit lately”, she admits, “Also, heavy periods.”

He doesn’t ask her if she has been to the doctor, because he knows she has.

“You want to come out with me and Morgan?” He offers. “We are going for a bit of gaming and whatnot.”

She says thank you, and passes up.

Reid touches her shoulder one last time before he heads out with Morgan.

Hotch is leaving too, and turns his eyes to me, and she thinks they are uncommonly dark, his mouth set, as if it had never followed the lines of a smile.

She makes a split-second decision then, one that she already regrets, but seriously what the fuck.

She walks up to him, and he nods, and then they are out of the conference room, and the words aren’t out of her mouth.

“How are you?”, She asks him.

“Good,” He says, eyes front, “You?”

“Have been better,” She tells him, and his head turns at that. _Now. Now._

“Come out for a drink?,” She pushes the avarice laden words out of her tainted mouth and into the darkness of his empty, staring eyes, and her heart beats wild.

For a moment, she thinks he is going to refuse, but then--

“When?”

She smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> The points of canon divergence are: Rather pursuing a career as Federal prosecutor, Hotch has a former career as CIA analyst, and he had done it for a while until he transferred to the FBI, thanks to Jason Gideon.


End file.
